Reviews RCD2145

The Last Hurrah!!´s second outing is a blissful 35-minute trip East in the company of an array of excotic instruments, and the delightfully squeaky-voiced Heidi Goodbye. Divided into subsections that take in the Middle East, India, Japan and Hawaii, its musical relatives in far-off places include "Bad Timing"-era Jim O´Rourke and Popol Vuh in wide-eyed tantric bliss mode. Fingerpickin´good. 8/10.Uncut (UK)

The multi-tracked guitar which introduces opener The Rush invokes West Coast Americana as though Stephen Stills and a bucolically-minded John Fahey were jamming on an open-top train down to Big Sur, before the sun-dappled daydream harmonies of Heidi Goodbye´s layered vocals on Lonely Whistle Call evoke "what if... thoughts of The Beatles´ 1972 new direction into country-pop. All eight tracks are sequenced into one 35-minute song cycle, with a breezy sense of questing voyaging as exemplified in song titles such as The Trip and Where Am I Now further invoking the feel of a lost ´60s beat relic. A beautiful fake, indeed.Rock-a-Rolla (UK)

This project could see him dubbed the Norse Ethan Jones, except "The Beauty Of Fake" is heaps better: carousel-like psychedelic folk with lots of Eastern-sounding tunings and the dreamy, if possibly divisive, vocals of Heidi Goodbye. "High In Hawaii" stands out as a potential winner with early-20s stoner girls who´ve grown tired of Cat Power. 4/5.Buzz (UK)

The Last Hurrah are one of the best folk acts in the world right now, but they’re sort of willfully obscure – as far as I can tell, the band does not perform live, and they insist on releasing their albums as one long track, with each song melting together as a continuous suite. “Lonely Whistle Call” is the first proper song on The Beauty of Fake, their second album, and a relatively mellow cut in a suite that becomes more elaborate and strange as its characters make their way around the world, through to Europe to India to Japan to Hawaii. The music shifts in character to suit the locales, but HP Gunderson’s tangle arpeggios and Heidi Goodbye’s cheerful, bemused voice tie it all together. I actually feel a little bad pulling this song out of context – really, a lot of the fun of The Last Hurrah’s music is just getting swept up in the momentum of the music and going along for the ride.Fluxblog (US)

One 35-minute suite, it merrily replicates music from around the world - Chinese zither, Indian ragas and Hawaiian guitar combining Heidi Goodbye´s engagingly squeaky vocals. Somewhere between the Incredible String Band and Jim O´Rourke, it synthesises a set of utterly inauthentic mantras for the modern world. Out of the wrong comes forth sweetness.The Times (UK)